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PG) Life of Pi

​20th Century Fox.PGRunning Time: 127 Minutes.4 stars out of 4.

Director Ang Lee's LIFE OF PI premiered at the New York Film Festival, and has garnered numerous amounts of awards buzz. Life of Pi is a breathtakingly beautiful, ambitious, technically superb, and entertaining piece of art, and deserves the Oscar buzz it has been getting, even despite its weak script. In Life of Pi a young writer(Rafe Spall) is interviewing Pi(Irfan Khan) about what he heard was his amazing story. Pi tells him the story, which takes place in India, where we meet a young Piscine Molitor "Pi" Patel and his family. Pi's family owns a successful zoo that has many animals. One day they decide to move to Canada because of a business opportunity, and they will sell the zoo in India, but take the animals to Canada with them and sell the animals there. Pi's family takes a ship to Canada with all the animals, and one night there is a storm, which causes the ship to sink, but Pi falls overboard onto a lifeboat with a zebra, hyena, tiger, and orangutan. Pi is by himself along with these 4 animals in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

Life of Pi is a film that reminds you why you go to the movies. It is ambitious, and uses 3D to immerse the viewer in the film. This film is a technical achievement, with many of the animals being CGI and motion capture. Also, this is the best 3D I have ever seen. Ang Lee uses 3D so well, that in my theatre when something came at the camera everyone gasped.

The acting by Suraj Sharma is great. Sharma adds depth and emotion to a character that is talking to a tiger the entire film. The rest of the "ensemble" is also solid, and this makes there characters feel real.

Ang Lee has proved he is a great director with his past films, and he shows the audience what great filmmaking really is. I hope that he is considered when the Oscar nominations come out, because without him this film really could have gone nowhere.

I have some flaws with Life of Pi, which is why I could not give it a perfect grade. My first flaw is that the framing device used where the elder Pi tells the writer his story, eliminates the suspense that is if Pi survives. My second flaw, is that the film takes a very long time to get going. It takes a long time until you are invested into the story and care about the characters, and when the moment of the shipwreck comes, I was invested with Pi and the story.